The novel opens with Barbara, who, after remembering incidents of torture at the hands of her father, has quite literally broken down. Found inside a disabled elevator, she is no longer able to function with her new consciousness of these memories-those which are so resistant to understanding. Confronted with this knowledge of evil, she must begin the painful process of remembering and reconstructing a new whole self.
Helping Barbara to navigate her grief and her memories are her therapist, the Psalms, and most of all, the words of Paul Celan. Paul Celan: 1920—1970, Poet. An eastern European holocaust survivor who wrote haunting poems about the darker spiritual trials of life and relationships that exhibit a compact style that fuses broken words and chopped syntax to produce a stark musicality.
This is a novel about a woman who goes to hell and back. It's a story which affirms the resilience of the human spirit and the healing power of love and faith. Mary Rakow, winner of a 2003 Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship for fiction, has a Master’s degree from Harvard University Divinity School and a PhD in Theology from Boston College. A native Californian, she currently lives in Los Angeles. The Memory Room is her first novel.
